Integrating nonelectronic components into electronic microsystems

Microelectromechanical systems will soon usher in a new technological renaissance. Just as ICs brought the pocket calculator, PC, and video games, MEMS will provide a new set of products and markets. The author presents the state of the art, from inertial sensors to microfluidic devices.     

Integrating skills into multi-agent systems

Currently, an important topic of robotic research is the design and development of multi-agent robot systems (MASs). In these a number of autonomous robots cooperate and coordinate themselves in order to pursue given goals. The agents of an MAS not only have to work autonomously or in cooperation with other agents, but in dynamic, relatively unstructured environments. Therefore, the agents require agent-specific but flexible skills to cope with their tasks and the environment's variability. On the other hand, the actions to be performed by agents in an MAS have to meet certain requirements imposed by the MAS's structure. The representation of actions has to support planning, inter-agent communication, task negotiation etc. In this paper, we describe a method of combining the agent-specific nature of skills with the requirements for a general action knowledge representation inherent to MASs, by presenting elementary operations (EOs) that provide an appropriate interface.     

Integrating security into the curriculum

Computer security can be used as a vehicle to achieve accreditation goals for computer science and engineering programs, while at the same time engaging students with relevant, exciting topics. The authors' approach, based on educational outcomes, illustrates that security topics can contribute to an engineering program by fostering all skills required to produce graduates capable of critical thinking     

Designing for testability

In the laboratory, a designer may conveniently analyse microprocessor circuits and their peripherals by means of suitable logic analysers. This is possible because he will have a detailed knowledge of his system and the time to learn the optimum methods of using his analyser. Once this system is a part of a product, it would be preferable if a less complicated means of verifying the processor's correct activity were available should a failure occur. An extremely convenient and inexpensive verification and diagnostic system may be designed into a product using two complementary techniques, selftest and signature analysis. The material cost of implementing such a system can be very small indeed whereas the savings in troubleshooting time and test equipment costs can be substantial.     

Standards for microsystems

Standardization is emerging as a very important element to be considered when larger computer systems are specified and designed. This article reviews some types of standard which might be applied and the effects of their application.     

Tribology of microsystems

In this work the possibilities for the reduction of friction and wear in micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) are investigated. An improvement of the tribological behaviour of microsystems can be realized by optimizing the contact condition and by application of special coatings with low friction and low wear rates. For optimizing the contact condition a defined topography and surface profile is generated by photolithography. Furthermore tribological coatings with low friction and low wear rates are developed and investigated using nanoindentation and micro scratch experiments. Also novel results on micro structured surfaces coated with a-C:H and a-C films will be discussed. The results show the great potential of carbon-based coatings in combination with an optimized geometrical surface design.     

Integrating economics into quality control charts

When control of a manufacturing process is needed, the common tool is Statistical Quality control (SQC). In the past, however, economic factors were the results after employing the SQC charts. Design of control charts refers to the specification of the sample size, the sampling frequency and the control limits for the chart. The authors have tested a model that uses economics as an integral part for the design of an X-bar control chart.

Douglas C. Montgomery developed a computer program for the optimal economic design of an X-bar control chart. The program is based on the cost model proposed by A.J. Duncan.

Montgomery's program was modified to select the optimal design parameters from a table of parameter values. Subroutines were developed to enable the user to enter the number of subgroups and the data points for each subgroup. The economically designed control chart is plotted using standard Graphical Kernel System (GKS) subroutines.     

Integrating IS Disciplines into End-User Training

In addition to software training, users need to learn systems analysis concepts and development techniques that will enable them to develop better and more reliable end-user applications. IS managers should realize that this type of IS-sponsored training not only improves the users' productivity but the IS staffs as well.     

Integrating Computer Algebra into Proof Planning

Mechanized reasoning systems and computer algebra systems have different objectives. Their integration is highly desirable, since formal proofs often involve both of the two different tasks proving and calculating. Even more important, proof and computation are often interwoven and not easily separable.In this article we advocate an integration of computer algebra into mechanized reasoning systems at the proof plan level. This approach allows us to view the computer algebra algorithms as methods, that is, declarative representations of the problem-solving knowledge specific to a certain mathematical domain. Automation can be achieved in many cases by searching for a hierarchic proof plan at the method level by using suitable domain-specific control knowledge about the mathematical algorithms. In other words, the uniform framework of proof planning allows us to solve a large class of problems that are not automatically solvable by separate systems.Our approach also gives an answer to the correctness problems inherent in such an integration. We advocate an approach where the computer algebra system produces high-level protocol information that can be processed by an interface to derive proof plans. Such a proof plan in turn can be expanded to proofs at different levels of abstraction, so the approach is well suited for producing a high-level verbalized explication as well as for a low-level, machine-checkable, calculus-level proof.We present an implementation of our ideas and exemplify them using an automatically solved example.Changes in the criterion of rigor of the proof' engender major revolutions in mathematics. H. Poincaré, 1905     

Integrating file operations into transactional memory

Researchers have proposed transactional memory as a concurrency primitive to simplify the development of multi-threaded programs. In this paper we present a new approach for supporting I/O operations in the context of transactional memory. Our approach provides isolation between the file operations of different transactions while allowing multiple transactions to concurrently perform I/O. To ease adoption, our approach attempts to implement the traditional I/O programming interface as closely as possible. We formalize aspects of our approach and use the formalization to reason about the correctness of the approach.We have implemented our approach as a Java library and have integrated it with the DSTM2 transactional memory system. We have evaluated the approach with several benchmarks including JCarder, TupleSoup, a financial transaction benchmark, a parallel sort benchmark, and a parallel grep benchmark. Our experience shows that the approach provides a straightforward mechanism for developers to integrate I/O in a transactional memory environment and that it performs well.     

Integrating behavior analysis into architectural modeling

Architectural modeling and behavior analysis are two important concerns in the software development. They are often implemented separately, and specified by their own supporting notations. Architectural modeling helps to guarantee the system design to satisfy the requirement, and behavior analysis can ensure the interaction correctness. To improve the trustworthiness, methods trying to combine architectural modeling and behavior analysis notations together have been proposed, e.g., establishing a one-way mapping relation. However, the one-way relation cannot ensure updating one notation specifications in accordance with the other one, which results in inconsistency problems. In this paper, we present an approach to integrating behavior analysis into architectural modeling, which establishes the interoperability between architectural modeling notation and behavior analysis notation by a bidirectional mapping. The architecture is specified by the modeling language, architecture analysis and design language (AADL), and then mapped to behavior analysis notation, Darwin/FSP (finite state process) through the bidirectional transformation. The bidirectional transformation provides traceability, which makes behavior analysis result provided by a model checker can be traced and reflected back to the original AADL specifications. In this way, the behavior analysis is integrated into architectural modeling. The feasibility of our approach is shown by a control system example.     

Integrating usability techniques into software development

Now merged into Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services, our company, formerly called Shared Medical Systems, creates clinical, financial, and administrative software for the healthcare industry. Like other medium to large companies, SMS had reached a scale and maturity level that required the development process to be documented, predictable, repeatable, measurable, and usable by the development groups. After much study and consideration, senior management committed to implementing a universal OO development methodology. Senior management recognized the need to improve customer satisfaction, which had always been high but needed to he better in an increasingly competitive market. Management saw the introduction of usability practices as a prime means to achieve this objective. So they began to place greater emphasis on usability-even to the point of building and staffing dual state-of-the-art usability labs. Our goal throughout the projects we describe was to combine the best OO analysis and design practices and usability techniques to create a powerful, unified way to develop software     

Integrating Guidance into Relational Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning, and Q-learning in particular, encounter two major problems when dealing with large state spaces. First, learning the Q-function in tabular form may be infeasible because of the excessive amount of memory needed to store the table, and because the Q-function only converges after each state has been visited multiple times. Second, rewards in the state space may be so sparse that with random exploration they will only be discovered extremely slowly. The first problem is often solved by learning a generalization of the encountered examples (e.g., using a neural net or decision tree). Relational reinforcement learning (RRL) is such an approach; it makes Q-learning feasible in structural domains by incorporating a relational learner into Q-learning. The problem of sparse rewards has not been addressed for RRL. This paper presents a solution based on the use of reasonable policies to provide guidance. Different types of policies and different strategies to supply guidance through these policies are discussed and evaluated experimentally in several relational domains to show the merits of the approach.     

Integrating software specifications into intrusion detection

There exist a number of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that detect computer attacks based on some defined attack scenarios. The attack scenarios or security requirements in some of these IDSs are specified in attack specification languages that are different from software specification languages. The use of two different languages for software specification and attack specification may generate redundant and conflicting requirements. The advantage of using the same language for both functional specifications and attacks specifications is that software designers can address the two different issues without learning two types of languages. We present a method of integrating Abstract State Machine Language (AsmL) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) state charts that are extended finite state machine based software specification languages, with an open source IDS Snort. This work provides AsmL and UML users an IDS that they can use without knowing how to write Snort rules. We automatically translate attack scenarios written in AsmL and UML state charts into Snort rules with context information. The original Snort is modified so that it can use the rules automatically generated by the translator. Adding context information to Snort rules improves the detection capability of Snort. To show the efficacy of the presented approach, we have built a prototype and evaluated it using a number of well-known attack scenarios.     

BDI agent testability revisited

Agent-based systems are deployed to solve a wide range of problems in a wide range of domains. Before software is deployed, it is important to obtain assurance that it will function correctly. Traditionally, this assurance is obtained by testing. However, there is an intuition that agents exhibit more complex behaviour than traditional software, which raises the question: how testable are agent systems? We focus on BDI agent programs, and analyse their testability with respect to the all edges test adequacy criterion (also known as “branch coverage”). Our results augment earlier results that considered the all paths criterion to provide a richer and more nuanced understanding of the testability of BDI agents. We show that the number of tests required with respect to the all edges criterion is much lower than that required with respect to the all paths criterion. We also show that, as for the previous analysis, BDI programs are harder to test than equivalently-sized procedural programs, even if exception handling is introduced. Overall, our conclusions lend strength to the earlier work, and motivate the need for work on formal methods for agent systems.     

Biosensors for analytical microsystems

A modular concept for analytical microsystems with separately developed and optimized components is proposed, where parts can be easily substituted. Since the system should be universal hybrid integration is preferred over monolithic fabrication technology.The biosensor as an essential part of an analytical microsystem is commonly restricted in its functional stability due to the lifetime of the biological component and the adhesion of the sensitive layer at the transducer. Optimum design requirements have to be derived from the particular system to be measured. For the optimization of the (bio)sensor the polymer matrix carrying or covering the enzyme has been modified, the transducer design itself has been varied, and enzymes have been coupled.     

Alpha 21164 testability strategy

A custom DFT strategy solved specific testability and manufacturing issues for this high performance microprocessor. Hardware and software assisted self test and self repair features helped meet aggressive schedule and manufacturing quality and cost goals